


Last Call

by pollinia



Category: Katekyou Hitman Reborn!
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-02
Updated: 2011-12-02
Packaged: 2017-10-26 18:44:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,401
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/286650
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pollinia/pseuds/pollinia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Two old men walk into a bar.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Last Call

Two old men walk into a bar. One says to the other--

No. Wait.

One sits down at the counter. Orders a double-shot of scotch. The other says--

No. Scratch that.

This isn't a joke.

Gamma is ten years and two funerals too old for jokes. He sits down next to the Doctor, orders his drink wordlessly, and they drink in the comfortable silence of old friends for a long time.

Except they're not, of course, not really. They're not old friends. They're from to different Families; they're enemies even, in some split-photon version of this life, if telekinetic visions are anything to be trusted, and Gamma's not entirely convinced they are.

But that's only part of the truth. Only the business part, and each can drink to the half-truth of that. Business isn't everything. Business isn't why tney're both here.

Well.

It is and it isn't.

Gamma orders another round. He clears his throat to speak.

Shamal beats him to it.

He says, "Twenty-four years."

Gamma swallows words and scotch. He isn't sure which one burns more.

"Twenty-four. Christ. The kids weren't even born yet."

And Gamma doesn't correct him. Doesn't point out that the kids are hardly kids anymore. That the Vongola Storm was never Shamal's, kid or not, but really, what's the point? They're all surrogates in this life. Too many babies running around like women and men.

Shamal digs the heel of his palm into the furrow of his forehead.

"Fucking Tsuyoshi," he says, and he slams back the rest of his drink.

The funeral for Yamamoto Tsuyoshi had taken place that afternoon. A strange coincidence found Gamma in Namimori, vulnerable to the invitation to join in with the grief-stricken. The entire thing was strange: a reminder, as if they needed one, that no one can really change the future. Not for the better, anyway. It's always just one heartbreak away from an apocalypse.

Gamma slouches down in his seat, elbows on the bar. The bartender looks familiar but unplacable--a combination which never ceases to make him nervous. But he's not in enemy territory now. It's just Japan, somber as always, another funeral on its soil, another son fewer.

And Yamamoto Tsuyoshi hadn't died at the hands of the Millefoire--or, really, Gamma's hands, if he were to be honest and guilty which he almost always is. Just a heart attack. Just a pedestrian, civilian, run-of-the-mill, one-more-day-in-suburbia death. But that hardly puts a damper on the grief.

Not that Gamma is really grieving here. He barely knew Tsuyoshi. He isn't grieving like Shamal, one of Tsuyoshi's oldest friends. Not like the son left behind, out of high school now but suddenly looking very much the part of the orphan. Not like the rest of the Vongola kids, one more replacement father gone. Not like he'd grieved for Aria. For Uni.

Aria had been like a bullet to the chest. When she was alive. When she'd died. He was stupid. He knew about attachment, the dangers of humanizing your boss, of pulsing imaginary blood through imaginary veins. But she had been--

"Beautiful," Shamal says, starting in on his third drink, this time whiskey.

Gamma brings his gaze up from the sticky bar, the refilled glass.

"Aria was beautiful," Shamal repeats, "Christ, what a loss."

Gamma folds his hand around his glass. "How did you--"

Shamal waves him quiet. "They're all the same. Every funeral. Every goddamned one." He swallows. Turns his eyes to the bar. "There's only ever one casket, isn't there? We see a hundred of them, but there's only ever one."

There's a ring in Gamma's pocket that should belong to a little girl, but it doesn't. It belongs to Gamma. There will come a day when he passes it on to the Giglio Nero's heir, but not yet. Not now.

He was given this ring at Aria's funeral. The Right Hand can keep anything safe. It's tradition. It's all tradition. Gamma swims in the stuff day after day. He hates it and he loves it.

There's a candle on the bar. He passes his hand over it; he feels the sharp, specific heat of the flame on his palm. He jerks away.

"It was a closed casket," he says.

Shamal slides a cigarette from his pocket. Brings it to his lips. Lights it.

"Does it startle you to see an open one? One without her in it?"

Gamma shrugs. "It was closed," he says, "so maybe she was never in it at all."

"Maybe." The smoke circles Shamal's head, circles and rises. Gamma watches.

"There was a woman. From Japan. She only came to Italy sometimes, only to see her son. Birthdays, once at Christmas." He takes another long drag. "You know her boy. She was..."

Gamma watches him in the dim light of the bar. He watches Shamal walk his fingers through his mental rolodex of words he uses to describe women. If men wax poetic on the women they have loved, then Shamal is a loaded limerick. But, Gamma can see, this woman is different.

"Luminescent," he says.

Two old men are sitting in a bar.

In a joke, this would be going somewhere.

But this isn't a joke. It might not be going anywhere at all.

"Did you love her," Gamma asks.

"As much as a man can love a memory."

Gamma looks around. The bar is mostly empty now.

"That's all she was, really. Once a year, and each time she was different than I remembered her. I probably made most of it up."

Gamma knows the feeling. The illusion of a concrete person, as if you really could reach out your hand and press skin to skin. Maybe feel pulse. But that's where he'd been wrong. He'd built this imaginary perfect thing in his mind, and just when she'd been fully realized, she was--

"Gone," Shamal said, "we were expecting her--it was her son's birthday--but..." He shrugged his shoulders. "Tsuyoshi told me the news. He knew her from here. She didn't know who he was, not really, not the ties he had. But he kept her safe, as much as he could. He was so good at that." Shamal laughs. "A natural caretaker. And look which one of us became the doctor."

There's something, Gamma thinks, about the mafia and beautiful, fleeting women. Maybe an inverse relationship between loveliness and life expectancy, and here they are, to ugly men right down to their cores, drinking themselves older and uglier.

"Twenty-four years we knew Yamamoto Tsuyoshi, and Sawada can't be bothered to leave CEDEF for his funeral. Son of a bitch."

Gamma follows along as well as he can, both of them drunk, both of them gone, Doctor Shamal dropping names like shared jargon when Gamma only knows these people through reputation.

"Not like we should be surprised, right? The man's had his own damn son for twenty years, his own damn boy, and he can't even be bothered to be a parent. What a fuck up. Some of us," he says, and tries to flag down the bartender who is ignoring him, "should not have been trusted to raise children."

From what Gamma knows of Gokudera Hayato--and he will admit that it is a sizable amount, when he is being honest and guilty for what another version of himself did in another version of this world--from what he knows, the man is an awkward, ill-adjusted foster child of the mafia-industrial complex. He is cigarette smoke and homemade bombs and no family but Family, and still the Doctor is a resilient part of his ragged young life.

Gamma doesn't know the details. He doesn't have to. He's observant and an analyst and if Shamal wants to slip into the skin of a father when he's a little too drunk and a little too sentimental, then Gamma's not going to stop him. He knows what it's like to be unable to help himself. To look at a young and lonely life and think, _What could be the harm? What if I could make it better?_

Two old men are sitting at a bar. They toss back shots of grief and loss and the occasional noble deed. Two old men sit at a bar and pretend that death makes more sense when they stack it up beside the spectacle of life.

Two old men sit at a bar.


End file.
